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FSF works with PayPal to the benefit of the free software community

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FSF works with PayPal to the benefit of the free software community

by
peterb
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—
Published on
Nov 23, 2009 11:53 AM

The Free Software Foundation thanks PayPal for responding to its concerns and making its terms more free software friendly.

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Monday, November 23rd, 2009 -- Usually when you hear good news about licensing from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), it's because some
noteworthy software has become free software or GPL-compatible when it
wasn't before. Today's news is a little unorthodox because it
doesn't fit that description--but it will still be a big help to free
software developers.

A large number of people in the free software community feel that PayPal
is a convenient way to send money to others. Part of the reason for this
is that you can use many of PayPal's services with only free
software--they typically don't require special proprietary software, or
even JavaScript.

However, FSF recently discovered that PayPal had added a proprietary
software license to its User Agreement. FSF license compliance engineer Brett Smith explained, "Of course, the FSF couldn't agree to
those terms, so as soon as we learned about them, we contacted PayPal to
see if we could make other arrangements. The company listened to our concerns, and specifically excepted us from
these conditions. But not only that: next year, PayPal is also updating its user agreement to ensure that
the free software community can continue to receive and make payments without having to accept a proprietary software license."

FSF executive director Peter Brown said, "We'd like to express our appreciation to PayPal for taking time to hear
us out and make this change. The company easily could have insisted on
keeping the terms as-is. But they recognized how important this issue was to the community, and put
in the effort to listen to us and accommodate our concerns. We want to
thank them for that generous help."

About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to
promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and
redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and
use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating
system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free
software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and
political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites,
located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information
about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at
http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.